Quiz 18: Fireworks

fireworks

We've seen in class that particle systems can be a very powerful tool for simulating many kinds of natural phenomena. For this quiz, we will consider the simulation of fireworks. Describe solutions to the following questions.

1) You will need to design a particle manager - this is the bit of logic that decides when and how particles get created, their lifespan, etc. Given that fireworks start with an explosion, and considering the momentum conservation principle, how should the particle manager initialize the initial velocity of each firework fragment, such that the system is physically plausible?

2) Different kinds of attributes/state variables need to be stored for each particle - for example their position, velocity and mass. What else?

3) What forces are acting on each particle?

4) Write pseudocode for the method that will integrate the state of the particles forward in time.